Your teacher HADASSAH DAMIEN is an artist, technologist, and iconoclast who founded Ride Free Fearless Money in 2015.
Damien has:
- launched freelance, cooperative, and collective businesses — and now coaches startups!
- defaulted on student loans she later paid off while a nonprofit employee,
- saved $15k while making $30k/year as a part-time employed working artist touring the US with queer art.
- 5x her income, going from broke and bummed to solid and strategic.
She comes from working-class western New York roots. She put values she inherited and others she admires into practice and under microscopes in her work as a community arts organizer, progressive tech builder, and educator.
Hi, it’s me:
Damien has an MA from the CUNY Graduate Center, an Honors BA from the University of Toronto, and is an Accredited Asset Management Specialist from the College for Financial Planning.
She’s a queer woman who, yes, rides all things two-wheeled including motorcycles, which inspired the title of this project. She lives and loves in Brooklyn, NY.
Ms. Damien works professionally by day in tech as a startup-coach, has been a small-business owner as a web developer, has run the financial side of small LGBTQ arts organizations, and has participated in cooperative, freelance, sharing economy, DIY and investment business ventures.
More about Hadassah at: hadassahdamien.com
Contact her via email: hd [at] ridefreefearlessmoney.com
RIDE FREE FEARLESS MONEY launched Fall 2015, and has served almost 1,000 people in courses, workshops and coaching since!
The mission of Ride Free is to stabilize progressive communities by empowering folks’ relationship to their money, to teach hacks for capitalism, and to help people get their time and energy back!
Ride Free started with recurring classes full of useful financial information, and a “talkshop” series where people who need help handling their financial lives were able to get the information they need to take care of themselves, their communities, and their [often chosen] families in a collaborative, community-building way.
Now expanded to online classes, workshops, and coaching, this information is designed are for people of all kinds and all income levels, with women and LGBTQ people at the center.
Ride Free’s teaching style is practical and action-oriented. Hadassah shares genuinely useful skills, tips, and life hacks in a space that honors the fraught relationships we each may have with money, and the intersectional reasons for that with conversational elements.
“Frankly, I think making handling finances achievable is a way to strengthen, de-stress, and support communities and individuals while de-centering silence, shame, and the concept of financial normativity.
- Women make ~$0.78 on a man’s $1.00, and POC folks make ~$0.58 on a white $1.00 on average in the US. To me, this means it’s crucial that our cents work harder for us and we have info to strategically deal with our money.
- Dyke bars, communal houses, and queer land projects close because they are owned by outsiders who kick out these communities — to me this means owning property is one way to hold the line for community spaces. E.g. The Lesbian Herstory Archives, Idyll Dandy Acres. These spaces need resourced supporters.
- Corporations take tax writeoffs that lose our social safety nets millions, while artists, freelancers, and part-time workers struggle to make ends meet — not realizing there’s tax writeoffs for us, too.
Why this project?
/ability/education — and yet these play into our experiences in important ways….which pretty much never get mentioned in money education.